NASA has reported a catastrophic event is taking place in space, but scientists are still investigating what exactly has happened or happening. Mysterious flashes of X-rays beamed towards Earth before vanishing just 24 hours later, leaving scientists to investigate the source. Initial findings suggest it came from a “completely new type of cataclysmic event”. The phenomenon was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, stemmed from a galaxy 10.7 billion light years away. The X-ray source, is located in the sky known as Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S).

Ceres (/ˈsɪəriːz/;[18] minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Its diameter is approximately 945 kilometers (587 miles), making it the largest of the minor planets within the orbit of Neptune. The 33rd-largest known body in the Solar System, it is the only dwarf planet within the orbit of Neptune. Composed of rock and ice, Ceres is estimated to compose approximately one third of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. Ceres is the only object in the asteroid belt known to be rounded by its own gravity. From Earth, the apparent magnitude of Ceres ranges from 6.7 to 9.3, and hence even at its brightest, it is too dim to be seen with the naked eye, except under extremely dark skies.

Ceres appears to be differentiated into a rocky core and icy mantle, and may have a remnant internal ocean of liquid water under the layer of ice. The surface is probably a mixture of water ice and various hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clay. In January 2014, emissions of water vapor were detected from several regions of Ceres. This was unexpected, because large bodies in the asteroid belt typically do not emit vapor, a hallmark of comets.

A red giant is a luminous giant star of low or intermediate mass (roughly 0.3–8 solar masses (M☉)) in a late phase of stellar evolution. The outer atmosphere is inflated and tenuous, making the radius large and the surface temperature as low as 5,000 K and lower. The appearance of the red giant is from yellow-orange to red, including the spectral types K and M, but also class S stars and most carbon stars.

The most common red giants are stars on the red-giant branch (RGB) that are still fusing hydrogen into helium in a shell surrounding an inert helium core. Other red giants are the red-clump stars in the cool half of the horizontal branch, fusing helium into carbon in their cores via the triple-alpha process; and the asymptotic-giant-branch (AGB) stars with a helium burning shell outside a degenerate carbon–oxygen core, and a hydrogen burning shell just beyond that.

Planet Nine is a hypothetical large planet in the far outer Solar System, the gravitational affects of which would explain the unusual orbital configuration of a group of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) that orbit mostly beyond the Kuiper belt.

The hypothesis first took form in a 2014 letter to the journal Nature by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott S. Sheppard, who had inferred the possible existence of a massive planet from similarities in the orbits of the distant trans-Neptunian objects Sedna and 2012 VP113. On 20 January 2016, researchers Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown at Caltech argued that a massive outer planet would be the likeliest explanation for the similarities in orbits of six distant objects. The predicted planet would be a super-Earth, with an estimated mass of about 10 times that of Earth (approximately 5,000 times the mass of Pluto), a diameter two to four times that of Earth, and a highly elliptical orbit that is so far away that it could take around 15,000 years to orbit the Sun.

On the basis of models of planet formation that might include planetary migration from the inner Solar System, such as the fifth giant planet hypothesis, the authors suggest that it may be a primordial giant planet core that was ejected from its original orbit during the nebular epoch of the Solar System’s evolution.

Interstellar travel is the term used for hypothetical manned or unmanned travel between stars. Interstellar travel will be much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight; the distances between the planets in the Solar System are less than 30 astronomical units (AU)—whereas the distances between stars are typically hundreds of thousands of AU, and usually expressed in light-years. Because of the vastness of those distances, interstellar travel would require either great speed, a high percentage of the speed of light, or huge travel time, lasting from decades to millennia or longer.

The speeds required for interstellar travel in a human lifetime far exceed what current methods of spacecraft propulsion can provide. Even with a hypothetically perfectly efficient propulsion system, the kinetic energy corresponding to those speeds is enormous by today’s standards of energy production. Moreover, collisions by the spacecraft with cosmic dust and gas can produce very dangerous effects both to passengers and the spacecraft itself.

A number of strategies have been proposed to deal with these problems, ranging from giant arks that would carry entire societies and ecosystems, to microscopic space probes. Many different spacecraft propulsion systems have been proposed to give spacecraft the required speeds, including nuclear propulsion, beam-powered propulsion, and methods based on speculative physics.

For both manned and unmanned interstellar travel, considerable technological and economic challenges need to be met. Even the most optimistic views about interstellar travel see it as only being feasible decades from now—the more common view is that it is a century or more away. However, in spite of the challenges, if interstellar travel should ever be realized, then a wide range of scientific benefits can be expected.